Facilitating the creation of a web of regional restraints comports well with both US and Indian approaches in Asia. Rather than remake the continent to America’s image, the US interest, since the ‘Washington System’ of the 1920s, has been to balance power within. For India, too, a stable Asian geo-political equilibrium remains a necessary condition for its rise, with nothing more likely to detract from the equation than the dominance of any one of its parts – an assertive China included. It was in keeping with this principle that New Delhi had framed its participation in the now-defunct ‘Quadrilateral Initiative’ – the putative axis of rimland and maritime democracies (Australia-India-Japan-US).

Yet the fading away of the ‘Quadrilateral Initiative’ after its inaugural senior officials-level meeting on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) summit in May 2007 also cuts to the heart of the obstacles to deepening bilateral US-India cooperation in the region.

First, contrary to the claim of its new breed of publicists that the ‘Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia are part of a single organic continuum’, Asia is not an integrated geo-political theatre. Particularly insofar as conventional security threats are concerned, the linkages are indistinct – Korean peninsula or Taiwan straits issues impinging as blurrily on India’s national security horizon as the Sino-Indian boundary conundrum or the New Delhi-Islamabad rivalry on Japan’s horizon. China’s growing strategic imprint on land and sea notwithstanding, the geostrategic unity of Asia is decades away.

Second, ‘South Asia’ and the broader Indian Ocean sub-region, unlike its counterparts east, is not a realistic joint operations theatre. Its peninsular geography in the midst of open ocean and lack of fixed adversary does not lend itself to practical joint contingency planning or crisis action procedures. With India increasingly bearing a larger share of the region’s security burden, the imperative, going forward, to simultaneously tighten the ‘jointness’ of roles and missions with US forces in the region – short of Chinese military recklessness – is also not wholly apparent. That the US and India are failing to significantly deepen cooperation in weapons procurement or logistics sharing due to policy obstinacy on both sides has not helped either.

Third, with Asia likely to play host in the not-too-distant future to six of the dozen largest economies in the world  – US, China, Japan, India, Russia and Korea, it is not altogether clear that the Asian equilibrium is about to greatly disturbed … let alone submit to a new geo-political hegemony bearing dragon-like features. Rather, the chief structural tension in Asia is the emerging disconnect between a hub-and-spokes shaped and US-centred security system and an East Asian economic system that is organising on community lines and in which the US is ever less a driving force. Indeed, to the extent that the geo-strategic and the geo-economic on the one hand and the geographic (South, Southeast and East Asia) on the other are joined in a single organic continuum, it is in the area of non-traditional security threats to the ‘maritime commons’ that link the globalising economic destinies of Asia’s constituent parts.

Shared and indivisible as such non-traditional security threats inherently are, they require resolutely cooperative approaches from all stakeholders. Selectively minilateralist or close-ended approaches like the ‘Quad Initiative’ that carve out unilaterally arrogated duties, commensurately, are likely to detract from this purpose. Further, with ASEAN gradually assuming an anchor-ship role within the region’s emerging security architecture, approaches that circumvent its agenda-setting authority are unlikely to be sustained. It is instructive that the Malacca chokepoint is the jealously guarded prerogative of its littoral states, and no amount of exclusivist cooperation on non-traditional security competencies around this reality will dislodge it. Going forward, it is equally clear that voguish minilateral initiatives to police the ‘maritime commons’ that involve the US, its treaty allies and selective partners (including India), but lack broader regional purchase, will not fare any better.

Rather, the essence of conception here – as the two countries embark on a third round of senior officials-level consultation on East Asia in the months ahead – is to frame tightly knit US-India security arrangements that are linked to the broader regional architecture. And to the extent that these arrangements are selectively pluralised, be it with Japan, Australia or others, they ought to be situated within the emerging practice of Asia’s ‘robust, effective, open and inclusive’ security multilateralism.

In this regard, the nascent ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting-Plus (ADMM+) framework, with its five Expert Workings Groups (EWGs) which follow a shared leadership approach pairing an ASEAN member state and a non-member state as co-chairs, provides a timely institutional format for deepening such cooperation. With Vietnam and China having expressed interest in co-chairing the humanitarian assistance and disaster-relief working group, and Malaysia and Australia the maritime security one, India and the US, working with ASEAN co-chairs and separately coordinating policy positions across working groups, could resourcefully vertically deepen and horizontally broaden bilateral security cooperation. That this institutional format is predominantly led by defence ministries, as opposed to foreign ministries, should also result in more expeditious implementation of agreed outcomes on the ground and at sea.

 

Sourabh Gupta is a senior research associate at Samuels International Associates, Inc and a contributor to EAF.

 

An expanded version of this post was first published here by CSIS